Dreamscape
by The Anonymite
Summary: The world was bridges and stairs.  Post-Inception, fuzzy on the details.  We're pretending, for the sake of this fic, that Dom intended to keep taking jobs after he got back with his kids.


**Disclaimer:** I do not own Inception.

* * *

Ariadne was slumped in one of the crappy chaise, the pseudo-IV trailing away from her wrist and over the arm of the chair.

It had been six months, Arthur realized, since he had seen her. It suddenly felt like a long time, and though he was never one to yearn, he had to admit that he had missed her. Fortunately, Eames wasn't there to ridicule him for the softening of his features as he settled a hand on her arm.

He would be lying to himself if he pretended that he hadn't grown inordinately fond of the sleeping woman. Her emphatic gestures when she spoke, the unrivaled creativity and stunning subtlety with which she manipulated and built dreams, the way her hair framed her face—they had all been reminders of how close she had managed to come to things he rarely let people near. Things like his heart and his emotions, things that he tended to keep as far out of his day-to-day life as possible. And he hadn't hated the idea of her coming closer still—hadn't hated it at all, in fact. Had _relished_ it, had actually entertained thoughts of the future.

And where had all that gone? Six months later, he found himself watching her sleep, wondering where the time had gone, and why he hadn't realized how much he had missed her.

He blinked and sighed, leaning back in his chair, eyes on her face.

Several minutes later, he leaned over to check the timer on the machine, smiling—just barely—to see ten minutes left.

It was with a feeling of mild guilt that he slid the needle into his wrist, but as he fell asleep, he had to admit that this was an enlightened idea. After all, he hadn't gotten to see Ariadne's solitary dreams before.

* * *

Predictably, the reality of her personal dream was astonishing.

Arthur had never been one to use peculiar words like "dreamscape" to describe these subreal worlds. This, however, was unmistakably a dreamscape.

The entire world was bridges and stairs, varying between gunmetal gray and gleaming bronze, all works of dreamphysics. The structures were mind-boggling, like something out of an M.C. Escher painting mixed with the structural precision of Joseph Strauss, each with a pinch of da Vinci-esque grandeur. He was absolutely floored. Honestly, though, he hadn't expected anything else.

He followed the vague outline of streets—lines made between towering spruce trees and thin, meandering rivers—content with not immediately stumbling upon his quarry. She would be here somewhere, he knew, building and warping the laws of physics.

He found her on a bridge made of agate, her feet dangling over the edge towards the silver water below. It was a small bridge, just wide enough to stretch shore to shore over the river, its curve graceful and, astonishingly enough, very traditional. Her arms were wound through the posts of the bridge's handrail, one hand fisted. She looked thoughtful as ever, and she did not look up as he walked towards her, hands in his pockets.

When he sat down, she turned her head, staring at him for a moment before saying:

"You're not a projection." She looked surprised.

"I'm not," he said, lifting his eyebrows at her—his version of casual smiling, as it were.

"What're you doing in France?"

"Isn't the better question 'What are you doing in my dream?'"

She shrugged, clasping her hands together, the gap between her palms wide enough that he caught a glint of gold. Her totem.

"That's your business, I guess, though your choice of things to do with your time raises questions."

"You graduated," he said by way of changing the subject, a smile evident in his tone though none was present when she looked. She twisted her lips, eyes fixing on a post to the left of his ear, tracing bands of brown and red in the stone.

"I did. It was oddly unsatisfying." A puff of air passing as a laugh escaped her lips, and she shook her head, eyes meeting his. "_Très honorable avec felicitations du jury_. Miles was overjoyed. I got to give a speech and everything."

"That's good. You likely awed people with your enthusiasm."

She smirked, shook her head, looked back at the water. Her hands tightened, as did her mouth.

"None of you came. I called because I thought one or two of you would be interested, but nobody ever got back to me." A pause. A crease formed between her eyebrows, her totem once again fisted in one hand, the other hand dangling loosely until she used it to push her hair out of her face.

"I waited six months to hear from any of you. I understood from the get-go that jobs don't come in every day, but I at least expected updates or contacts or…anything, you know?" She was starting to look exasperated.

"I've never been a particularly socially-oriented person, which is not to say that I'm antisocial or anything, but after a while, I realized that you were the closest things to friends that I had. I know that's a dangerous line to cross sometimes, especially considering what we do, but…would it have hurt to at least call?"

Her eyes, as they turned on him, were hurt, baffled, and generally questioning. He sighed, leaning his head against a post, eyes on hers.

"Calling isn't something that any of us are particularly good about. I speak mostly for myself in that, but Dom has been predictably preoccupied, and Eames will be Eames. All I can say is I got your message, and I'm sorry I didn't return it. I did plan to, but… things got away from me."

She studied him, eyes darting around his face, expression slipping backwards into the thoughtfulness that he had such a hard time reading.

"What happened?"

He blinked, eyes widening. What did she mean "what happened"?

"That made you forget, I mean. You're like an elephant. Always remembering and remembering. Details are you job, right?"

"I—one makes enemies when they do this job. I… ran into a few people that I didn't really want or need to run into and had to lie low for a while. Which included not making phone calls to people that I didn't want them talking to." In fact, her calling in the first place had been what had set that train of thought off, and after he had listened to her voicemail, he had turned his phone off, keeping a hold of it only because they were watching him too closely for it to be safely disposed of, and her phone number would be one of the first things dredged up when they searched it.

"That makes sense, I guess," she said, still watching him, face still unreadable.

The light shifted, and they both looked up to see a cloud drifting over the gap in the trees above them. It was a distinctly peculiar cloud.

"Opalescent clouds?"

"They remind me of my favorite Beatles song," she said by way of explanation, a smile lingering somewhere in the curve of her cheeks.

"Which would be?"

"Lucy In the Sky With Diamonds. You have to admit, it's beautiful imagery."

"_Drug-riddled_ beautiful imagery."

She laughed another puff-of-breath laugh, shifting to slip her totem into her pocket, one leg pulled up onto the bridge while the other continued to dangle.

"It wasn't actually written about drugs. It's about a picture John Lennon's little boy drew." A brief smile was flashed his way, and she looked back up at the sky. "Pure creation, right?"

Another bridge began to build itself in thin air, and within seconds he could tell that she was making it out of opal. It caught the light like a particularly exuberant oil slick, its edges fuzzing into existence like anti-erasing. With swipes of her mind's eye, she erased the semblance of normality that was the air above them, replacing it with raindrop architecture, beams and suspensions trickle-thin, stretching.

"You haven't dreamt in a while, have you?" He was quiet as he asked, head tilted back to watch the bridge materialize.

"It's hard to when you don't have a machine of your own," she replied, rolling down to lie on her back, arms folded on her stomach. The bridge concluded on one side with a wheel ten feet wide and spoked. The other end did the same, both sides connecting to the trees on either side via chrome and glass cables, a single staircase going up one side, a ladder going up on the other, connected to nothing.

"You don't dream on your own anymore, then." It wasn't a question—he knows the tone of someone who can't operate that part of their sleeping mind without the aid of biotechnology anymore.

"The last dream I had was right before the inception," she said, blinking as the sun flashed rather painfully against the chrome of the staircase. "I was falling. I think you were there."

"Huh." He glanced at her, saw a smile curling her lips. It was rare to see her smile.

"You were… dancing, or something. I was mad because I couldn't dance with you while I was falling, and you looked stupid anyway, and I couldn't figure out why I would want to dance, and I couldn't convince my dream to give me wings or a parachute so I could stop falling long enough to ask you what you were doing." A laugh, one with sound behind it this time, escaped, and she shook her head slowly. "It really bothered me. Maybe I stopped dreaming because I was so aggravated with not having total control over the situation."

"You know, Ariadne," he said, watching her smile fade into the quiet expression of contentment that he had always been partial to. Placidity looked good on her. "I'm very sad that I didn't get to see you graduate."

She turned her head, eyebrows lifting, but she remained silent.

"It…would have given me an excuse to see you."

"You don't need an excuse to see me."

"I need one to convince myself that I'm not being stupid and frivolous."

The smile was returning, and her fingers shifted against one another quietly.

"Frivolousness is okay most of the time. You just have to make sure it has a point."

"Isn't the entire purpose of frivolity its utter lack of purpose?"

"Not particularly. It can be used as a means to an end, if you do it right."

"How so?"

"See that bridge up there?"

"I very distinctly see that bridge up there, yes. It's a pretty noticeable bridge."

"The bridge itself is completely pointless—the ladder doesn't go anywhere, so the only point of climbing the stairs and crossing it is simply for the sake of climbing the stairs and crossing it. I made it up in my head and I thought it would be pretty, and we were talking about opalescent things. It's a creation of frivolousness with the point of making you stop fiddling with your totem and looking uncomfortable."

He blinked, looked at his hand, which he had moments ago (and entirely unconsciously) removed from his pocket, where it had been fingering the die. He hadn't noticed when he had stretched his legs out and put his full weight on the bridge rail behind him, but if he were to label the position, he would judge it as fairly comfortable, and himself as fairly relaxed. This seemed to be a new thing, judging by the feeling of continuing loosening in his shoulders.

"Case and point," he said, giving her a rather startled look—and receiving in return yet another smile. She sat up, leaning the side of her own head against a post, returning to her earlier study of his face.

"I missed you, too."

And from there it was entirely natural for them to lean into each other, lips meeting softly. Whether or not the validity of the mutual action was affected by the fact that they were, indeed, in a dream became irrelevant as they both woke up, smiled, and kissed again before adjourning for lunch.

* * *

The next time Arthur dreamed, he built a bridge, just for the hell of it. It wasn't made of opal or agate, but it was a fairly pretty wood, for which he gave himself points, and it was functional—he walked across it a few times, just to test it—but it lost a lot of its glory in that there wasn't a river to be crossed anywhere in sight.


End file.
